Now that I’ve painted a picture of what the 2024 outlook is looking like for the freight industry, it’s important to remember that it isn’t all doom and gloom. There’s plenty you can do to protect your bottom line and maintain a steady cash flow. One of the best ways to do that is to optimize your technology stack in various ways.
First, you’ll want to make sure you’re using the right credit risk software that can integrate with your own financial data and the data you have on your customer portfolio. This will be key as it will provide valuable data and insights into the financial health of your accounts. And that means your Accounts Receivables team will be able to better manage and prioritize collections, lower the risk of bad debt, speed up invoice payment times and, ultimately, improve cash flow.
On top of using credit risk software that can integrate with your sales ledger, you should also look at using software to automate the credit decisioning process. By doing this, you can create customized workflows based on your credit policy. Not only will you reach credit decisions quicker, but you’ll also be able to rely on those decisions. Don’t just take our word for it. We recently surveyed finance managers to understand their credit decisioning process.
Here's what we found:
- 97% of finance managers process up to 100 credit applications a day.
- For 63% of businesses, it takes up to 5 people to make credit decisions on new customers.
- 75% of finance managers take up to a full day (8 hours) to reach a credit decision on a single customer.
These findings just prove how much value you’ll get if you automate the credit decisioning process.
You should also look at automated cargo dimensioning technology. This type of tool will save time on the manual measurement of goods that need to be delivered and provide more accurate billing. The result? A potential recouping of costs compared to physical rounding down.
Finally, you can also reap rewards from using freight forwarding software as it can help cut down on manual work. By automating the creation and sharing of import documents and quotes and managing margins, you’ll end up saving more money and time in the long run.